Review: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Rated R for strong violence and gore, and for sexuality and language (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 3 out of 5

Let's get one thing straight right away. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is only barely a Friday the 13th movie. The man in the hockey mask himself only appears briefly towards the beginning and end of the film, and spends most of the rest as a demon slug who slithers into people's mouths and possesses them to kill. If you want your Jason Voorhees fix, literally any other movie in the series (save for the original and A New Beginning) will do the job better than this one. Whether among diehard fans or casual ones, this film is the black sheep of the series, holding a status not dissimilar to Halloween III: Season of the Witch as the one that spurns the famous iconography of its killer in favor of something completely different. Thus, it's not a surprise that a lot of people call this the worst Friday movie, remembered only for its weird plot and the fact that the ending set up a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street.

So allow me to dispute that assessment. Not only because A New Beginning and Jason Takes Manhattan exist, but because, if you take this as an original slasher story in which the killer is a body-hopping demon, it actually kind of works. (Another similarity it shares with Halloween III, incidentally.) The production values feel higher despite the film being just as low-budget as before, the director has a pretty good grasp of suspense that makes this film actually scary at a few points, and the gore is not only some of the nastiest in the series, it's enough to hang with some of the bloodiest splatter and torture porn flicks out there. (Let's just say, there's a reason they had to cut two whole minutes from this movie to get it down to an R rating.) The acting is still as shaky as ever save for one scene-stealing character who didn't get nearly enough screen time, the second act was terribly slow, and the additions the film makes to the Friday mythos at times feel like bad fanfic, but this is still a film that doesn't deserve the terrible reputation it has.

We start the film with the police doing what they should've done at least five movies ago: launching an organized manhunt for Jason Voorhees, cornering him, and literally blowing him to smithereens. His dismembered remains are taken to a federal morgue, where it turns out that, even as little more than a pile of gore, Jason still has one last trick up his sleeve as his spirit possesses the coroner, who sets out on a new rampage back to Crystal Lake, occasionally swapping out a worn-out and damaged body for a new one. There, by taking over the body of a member of his family (specifically Jessica, daughter of his half-sister Diana), he can be reborn. However, just as Jason can only be reborn by possessing one of his family members, so too can he only be permanently killed by one, which leads Creighton Duke, a bounty hunter with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Jason Voorhees case who realizes that he isn't actually dead, to travel to Crystal Lake to warn Jessica and her family.

This is the film's big twist: outside the opening scene and the climax, we never actually see Jason for most of the movie. He spends most of it as a demon slug that possesses people, swapping bodies by slithering out of its current host's mouth and into that of a new one, in scenes that are never not disgusting. That's not the end of it by a long shot; virtually everything about the gore in this film feels jacked up from its predecessors, from when Jason first possesses the coroner by driving him to eat his heart (shown in graphic detail) to the result of what happens when Jason leaves the body he's currently possessing (it melts, also in graphic detail) to a new look that shows his head partially growing around his hockey mask. His body count too is massive, and it is bloody, as we see a co-ed getting violently torn in half lengthwise, a face getting minced, and a man's head getting shoved into a vat of boiling cooking oil, among many other highlights. This is one of those movies where the unrated version really does add something to the experience, especially if you like your horror movies nice and bloody. And director Adam Marcus puts all that gore to good use. He does what few Friday directors before have seriously tried to do: he makes the killer's rampage actually scary, building suspense by frequently putting Jason around people who knew the man he's currently wearing as a flesh puppet, as they don't realize the trouble they're in until it's too late. There's only one scene like this where it doesn't really work, largely because it contradicts what had been indicated about Jason before then (namely, that, since Jason's speaking ability is limited to guttural vocalizations, so is that of the people he's possessing), but overall, this is a film that does a very good job of not falling into the trap of being too corny to take seriously.

Unfortunately, that scene I mentioned earlier hints at what is, undoubtedly, a real problem with the film beyond "not enough Jason". The story often felt like it was made up as it went along, adding new rules to how Demon Jason is supposed to "work" that it doesn't follow to the letter. The sudden introduction of Jason's family as important to the plot also felt like the process that many TV shows go through when they're getting long in the tooth, adding new characters that the cast is supposed to have always known but weren't mentioned until now. I'm not including divergences from the canon of the previous films (taken by this one in more or less broad strokes), as I'm still not entirely convinced that the script didn't begin life as an original idea that later got turned into a Friday movie, though I am convinced by reports that the script was cranked out in four days and was apparently even worse than this originally. It was largely due to the charisma of Steven Williams as Creighton Duke, easily my favorite character in the film, that all of this ridiculousness went down easy and I didn't completely lose the plot. A mix of John Shaft and Dog the Bounty Hunter, Creighton Duke is a cowboy badass who should've felt like an obnoxious "Gary Stu", a character created as wish-fulfillment for men in the audience who wanted to vicariously live through a character who could kick Jason's ass, but Williams makes the man seem genuinely cool, both slick and threatening. He got some of the best scenes in this, and honestly, I found myself wishing that he had more screen time and got more to do, especially early in the film. How do we know that he's the expert on Jason? The film never explains, but from the moment we meet Duke, we just know.

The rest of the cast was fairly middling, often plagued by overacting and bad line readings, but at this point, this isn't something out of the ordinary for a Friday movie. While nowhere near the level of Scream, there is some self-awareness here, from jokes about drugs and premarital sex to the glimpses into how the town of Crystal Lake might react now that (they think) Jason is finally gone for good. One scene where we're introduced to some obligatory teenage victims was funny at first, but wore off its welcome initially, but another set in a diner celebrating Jason's death with special hockey mask burgers was pretty charming. The film's greatest weaknesses showed in the second act, when both the kills and the Creighton Duke appearances were few and far between, as we spent most of our time with Jessica, her boyfriend Steven, her mother Diana, and Diana's co-workers at the diner. For every good scene, there were at least two that didn't land and felt like they were there just to pad the (fairly slim) runtime, the film mistaking exposition for character depth and plot movement. Large portions of the second act just crawled, and by the hour mark I was waiting for things to get moving again.

The Bottom Line

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday gets a bad rap from fans. I honestly think it should've been a standalone movie rather than a Friday sequel, and had a lot more time spent on the script, but as its own film, I was surprised by how solid it was. In the ranks of this series, this is nowhere near the best, but it's not even the second-worst.